Focus

Popeless Bishops. The Chinese Road to Schism

Another bishop has been ordained in China without papal approval. The authorities of Beijing insist on creating a Church independent of Rome. Vatican diplomacy in the dark

by Sandro Magister

ROME, July 9, 2012 – While the journey of reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Society of Saint Pius X founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre is in danger of failing just when the destination is in view, on another front, that of China, there is another schism that is becoming more critical by the day.

On July 6, in Harbin, the capital of the northern province of Heilongjiang, with almost 10 million inhabitants, a bishop was ordained illicitly without the mandate of the pope.

He was ordained by five bishops who until that moment were in union with Rome, but who by this action have also incurred excommunication, joining the crowd of Chinese bishops in a state of schism.

The illicit ordination in Harbin had been announced months beforehand. In the last two years, three other illicit episcopal ordinations have taken place in Chengde, Leshan (see photo), and Shantou. They were imposed by the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, an organism created and tightly controlled by the Communist party, with the purpose of constituting a national Church independent of Rome.

To do this, the Communist authorities require the participation in illicit ordinations not only of the bishops already in a state of schism with Rome, but also of some legitimate bishops, forcing them as well to break with the pope.

For those who repent, or show that they gave in to coercion, Rome revokes the excommunication. But the position of each one does not always appear clear. And this increases the confusion and the conflicts between the clergy, the faithful, and the bishops themselves.

*??Last June 15, when the illicit ordination in Harbin was imminent, the secretary of the Vatican congregation for the evangelization of peoples, the Chinese archbishop Savio Hon Taifai, tried to convince the Chinese authorities to desist with an interview with the agency "Asia News" of the Pontifical Institute of Foreign Missions.

In it he said, with regard to the ordinations made without the mandate of the pope:

"There are several problems. The first is that these ordinations create confusion and division among the Christian people of China, between the official and underground communities. Especially among the newly baptized, there are those who do not understand and are left stunned. Unfortunately, this confusion happens even among underground communities. Many of them have always given a shining witness of fidelity to the Church. But some have difficulty forgiving these situations, perhaps because of human frailty or some other reason, and go to the other extreme, which is not compatible with Gospel values.

"An illegitimate ordination hurts the hopes of dialogue between the Chinese government and the Chinese Church. And yet the Holy See is left speechless: China today, so modern and tolerant in many respects, however, remains behind on the development of the Catholic Church. Beijing can not understand that the appointment of bishops is a prerogative of Catholics and not the State. If you must give freedom to the Church in China, you must also give freedom to the pope to choose candidates for the episcopate. All these gestures have obscured the hope of relations between the Holy See and China. Before there were glimmers of hope, now we see only darkness."

*

Initially planned for June 29, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, patrons of the Church of Rome, the illicit ordination in Harbin was then postponed for a few days.

And on July 3, the Holy See made a last attempt to have it canceled, with a note from the congregation for the evangelization of peoples that warned both the bishops implicated and the Chinese authorities of the negative effects that this act would involve.

To the former it reiterated that they would automatically incur excommunication. To the latter it said:

"The government authorities were informed that the ordination of Rev. Yue Fusheng is without the approval of the Holy Father. It would contradict those signs of dialogue advocated by the Chinese Party and the Holy See."

*

But even this extreme pressure had no effect. On the contrary, a reply to the note from the Vatican came the following day from Beijing's state administration for religious affairs, with a declaration that dismissed the position of the Holy See as "barbarous and irrational," and accused it of creating with its interference "restrictions of freedom and intolerance, undermining the healthy development of the Catholic Church in China, and bringing no benefit to the universal Church."

So on July 6, in Harbin, the priest Yue Fusheng was ordained bishop, designated by the Chinese authorities (through a local committee that voted for his appointment) without the approval of the pope.

The five bishops who ordained him were Fang Xinyao of Linyi in Shandong, Pei Junmin of Liaoning, Meng Qinglu of Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, Wang Renlei of Xuzhou in Jiangsu, and Yang Yongqiang of Zhoucun in Shandong.

The first of these five is also national president of the Patriotic Association.

While the newly ordained is vice-president of the same organization.

In addition to these two, the executive group of the Patriotic Association includes four bishops lacking the approval of the pope (Ma Yinglin, Lei Shiyin, Guo Jincai, Huang Bingzhang), two bishops who were ordained legitimately but then incurred grave acts of rupture with Rome (Shen Bin of Haimen, Meng Qinglu of Hohhot), two lay Catholics, Liu Yuanlong and Shu Nanwu, and a sister, Wu Lin.

The illicit new bishop, Yue Fusheng, 48, in 1995 participated in the World Youth Day in Manila, where a Chinese delegation was authorized for the first time. And between 1997 and 1998 he studied in Belgium at the Catholic University of Louvain.

In Harbin there is already an apostolic administrator recognized by the Holy See, Zhao Hongchun. But because of his opposition to the ordination of the new bishop, the Chinese authorities arrested him on July 4 and released him after the ordination had been completed.

*

The illicit ordinations in the last two years have seriously compromised the efforts of the Church of Rome to bring all of the Chinese bishops into communion with the pope.

While three years ago, the bishops without the papal mandate could be counted on the fingers of one hand and seemed near extinction, today their number has grown quite a bit.

In the West, little attention is paid to this de facto schism, which separates from Rome a substantial fraction of the Chinese Church.

On the contrary, there is a strange tolerance for this abuse of power by the Chinese state authorities in the selection of bishops, a tolerance expressed precisely by proponents of that progressive wing which thunders the most against the "Constantinian" Church.

One of these is professor Alberto Melloni, the leader of that "school of Bologna" which has produced the most widespread and influential history of Vatican II published so far.

In an article last March 13 in "Corriere della Sera," Melloni accused the combative cardinal Zen Zekiun, because of his alarms against schism, "of a closure toward the government of Beijing so complete as to have put in jeopardy the results, sometimes as small as a seed, previously obtained by pontifical diplomacy."

And with regard to the claim of the Chinese authorities to select bishops, he has made it known that this is fine with him, because it is a decision "that in Christian regimes Rome has shared with Catholic chapters or crowns, and that in the China of tomorrow could be nothing other than the fruit of a qualitative selection of candidates by multiple voices."

___________

The June 15, 2012 interview on "Asia News" with the secretary of the congregation for the evangelization of peoples:

Last April 23-25, the last session of the commission instituted by Benedict XVI to examine the questions concerning the life of the Catholic Church in China dedicated a good part of its discussion precisely to the danger of schism, as demonstrated by the final statement, issued in Italian, English, and Chinese: